Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Twitter, ShatterCity and Sprawl Crawler

Published on 24 April, 2009 in Internet, Life, News, ShatterCity, Writing and tweeted. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been plugging away at my two new projects, which makes me sad because I so often ignore this one.  My blog has become a tweet repository.

I have just over 200 followers on Twitter now. Some of them bots or SEO hacks, but mostly genuine people who don’t see to mind me cursing, bitching and giving Office Coffee the finger. I still have to explain twitter, and the twitter connection to my facebook status, since people assume that I am on facebook all day. I’m not.  I’m blistering my thumbs on my BlackBerry all day.

My two top tweeted words? Not counting “blip” or “fm” (from blipping to tweet, which I used to do often). “Fucking” and “Internets”. Hence, the new catchphrase craze that’s sweeping the fucking internets: “Fucking Internets”. There’s a project in this.

Speaking of projects, I will discuss two of the two projects that are in the works. I will do this now.

ShatterCity: Once destined to become a local sprawl crawler, where people of the Mid-Hudson Valley could find out what the fuck is going on from there to here to there again. Well, I decided that ShatterCity wasn’t a very good name for that, cool as it sounded one morning at 3am, where many things sound much better than they really are.

ShatterCity is now going to be a literary experiment. An ongoing novel with many characters, stories and authors. Mixing and mashing their way through some very strange, dark city.  I’ve begun to invite some folk and I’m working on a bible for it. I think at the very least, it should be some fun.

SprawlCrawler: This is now the local Sprawl Crawler. See what I did? Clever, eh? It’s designed to be a local portal of things happening in the Mid-Hudson Valley, complete with a classified section, social network and all sorts of strange people sharing all sorts of strange things. I’m hoping that it winds up being mildly succesful, and that it gets used by those strange and interesting people of this region.

Oh, let me add: Fucking Internets.

AB

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What? An Actual Post?

Published on 19 April, 2009 in Internet, Life, ShatterCity, What the...? and Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Hello, Internets. Or should, I say, “Fucking Internets”?

I’ve been away from ill-literati.org. Not by choice, necessarily.  I’ve been very busy with attempting to get up for work at 4:30 am, coming home and spending time with the Kid and trying to get other things done.

In other words, I’m tired all of the time, and I whine incessantly about it.

Work has cracked down on internets usage, and I’m no longer hidden in my “area”. So all of my internets happens through twitter on my BlackBerry, which is why to some people, it appears that I am on the Internets all of the time.

Good news is that work is getting to the point where it will be less intrusive. Bad news is that, I soon won’t have my kid to keep me occupied in the afternoon evening.  She’ll be moving back to Florida with her mom after the end of the school year.

Which sucks. I’d rather not have the more time that will give me. But at least I can bitterly take that away with me.

Internets Projects have been reinstated. And I’ll start sharing them now. But don’t bother checking them out yet. Unless you really want to.

ShatterCity.com is now mostly operational. It’s down to design and opening it up and getting people to sign up. It’s designed to be a local destination for people here in the Mid-Hudson Valley to share news about music, art and other local happenings, current events, etc.  I’m using WordPress MU, with BuddyPress for the social networking end of it (yes, just what people need, another social network) and bbPress for the groups/forums. It’s also something I’m hoping to eventually monetize with local advertsing or something along those lines.  Especially if it gets large, because I’ll likely have to find myself alternate webhosting solutions that will cost me some larger coin.

The other project which is currently in a state of more than early development is fuckinginternets.net.  This is based on my new meme which was created by my constant swearing and talking about the internets on twitter. Apparently, the two most frequent words I used to casually use on twitter were “fucking” and “internets”. Now their use is more than casual. I don’t know what the core of fuckinginternets will be. The idea is likely to be a blog about things on the internets that make one say: “Fucking internets!” But I’ll also be selling some merchandise on that one. Fucking Internets t-shirts and shit like that with cute innuendo-laden graphics. Will probably start out using cafepress or some such fucking internets service like them to produce the merch.

Lame-ass project with potential if I ever get around to it, is a NetFlix user site that won’t be discussed further at this time. Shouldn’t have mentioned it, actually. Shut mah mouf.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I missed you, fucking internets. And I look forward to sharing more shit with you soon.

Laters,

AB

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New Web Project! WTF?

Published on 15 February, 2009 in Internet, News, ShatterCity and What the...?. 0 Comments Tags: .

So, you may say to me, “AngryBob, why the fuck would you start another web project, when this one is 98% daily twitter digests and the occasional ‘Jedi Jesus’ comic?”

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, doled out by myself.

But to be fair, this is a project I’ve had kicking around in my skull for quite a long time. I tried occasionally to attempt to think about integrating it with ill-literates and ill-literati, but it was always crowded out by the fact that the ill-sites were more of a personal nature.

So, another attempt. One which I have no fucking time for, but will fucking make the time for.

But this will be purely separated from the ill-sites. No random blathering on my addiction to BlackBerry tweeting from the shower. This is all business.

Details to be announced soon.

I hear you laughing. We’ll see.

AB

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Bolt! BlackBerry Browser Beta!

Published on 3 February, 2009 in BlackBerry, Internet and Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

CrackBerry, you’ve done it again…
Thanks to them, I’m now beta testing a new mobile browser, name of Bolt. It’s only been a few minutes, so I’m just gonna share some small tidbits and give you a proper review in a few days after I’ve fucked with it lots more.

  1. No Flash. Actually, this is alright. I haven’t found a mobile browser yet that has it. This mostly means no Blip.fm on the BlackBerry for me. I tested that first thing out. Still only reblips off of page 1.
  2. Supports Ajax, Java and FLV (streaming video, kids!). Logged into my site here, and everything looks and acts just as it does in the big internets.
  3. Fast? Well, yes and no. Page load speeds are impressive, but navigation with the trackball is a little slow and hitchy/jerky. The faq says you can use the keypad, but I haven’t tried that yet.
  4. Split Screen. The amount of the page being displayed is smaller than it is in Opera mobile. This means that what you are looking at is bigger. Problem with that is that this means you are seeing less of the page, which hinders navigation. But! You have the option of doing a split screen, which gives you a second screen that shows more of the page, with the first screen being a boxed area within that. This makes navigation much easier.
  5. According to the faq, Bolt will work on “lots of phones, even basic ones”. You don’t need a smartphone for Bolt. Which is a nice option for people who don’t have smartphones.

Again, give me a few days to fuck around with this and I’ll let you know what I think of it.

AB

http://crackberry.com/bolt-browser-updated-version-83

http://www.boltbrowser.com

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Upgraded

Published on 1 February, 2009 in Ill-Literati, Internet, News, Powered By, WordPress and Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Spent the evening working here. Upgraded MU WordPress to 2.7. So far, so good. No glitches, bugs or major problems. Nice.

Upgraded to the latest version of K2, made the modifications I had in the older version. Still need to upgrade for the home site.

Just about done with K2 for Comics. Modifed it to flow with the rest of the site. Should be cleaned up and available for anyone who wants it tomorrow.

Listened to the blip feed for a good while. Didn’t blip as much as I would have liked. That’s what I get for being such a piss poor code monkey.

Goodnight, kids.

AB

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Upgraded to MUWP 2.7

Published on 1 February, 2009 in Ill-Literati, Internet, Powered By and WordPress. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Lemme know if there are any problems, glitches, etc.

AngryBob

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Review: Slacker Radio For BlackBerry

Published on 11 January, 2009 in Gadgets, Internet, Music and Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

My new favorite thing is my BlackBerry Curve. I use that fucker for almost everything now. I do my internets (even posting here from it), get my news, make notes, text my friends and family and even, on occasion, make a phone call on it.

The one thing I don’t do much, is listen to music on it. Before I discovered Blip.fm, I was strictly a last.fm and Pandora user. And there are no apps yet that will allow me to use any of those services on my BlackBerry.

Being a devoted addict of my BlackBerry, I cruise BlackBerry sites looking for cool tips, apps and other random shit, and was immediately aroused by the mention on CrackBerry that a Slacker app was available for my gadget.

I mean almost literally aroused. Like, “schwing”! (How bad did I date myself just now?).

I had heard of Slacker, but hadn’t used it. I knew it was an internets streaming radio stations thing. Most of what I heard about it revolved around their gadget, which is a fancified mp3 player with wi-fi and a nice screen so that you can listen to your streaming radio around the house or on the go (if you’re in a wi-fi hot spot). Non-satellite satellite radio. Let’s now call it satel-light radio.

Anyway, I didn’t bother, because I generally can’t afford gadgets, and usually listen to CD’s or NPR in the car (I know, I’m living in some kind of cave with some of this shit), and last.fm, Pandora and blip.fm are perfect and enough for me at home. My phones are equipped to play ‘Sprint Radio‘, but it’s not quite as customizable and you’re stuck in fairly narrow (though good) genre radio. I like the ability to ‘love’ or ‘ban’ a track, which Sprint Radio does not do.

So, I immediately downloaded the Slacker app for the BlackBerry, logged in and immediately knew that I had done the right thing.

Once you’re logged in, you can choose from a good number of pre-existing genre stations, or go for customizable like they do in last.fm. To start things off, I entered my current favorite band, “Mission of Burma“, which is a mildly obscure band. Almost instantly, it started to play This Is Not A Photograph by Mission of Burma. It followed that up with some other post-punk sorts of things that I seriously enjoyed. The GUI is nice and easy and looks good. They have an album cover view for the artist you’re listening too, with what played before and coming after, visible to the sides in a carousel-like fashion.

I did hear adverts (about three so far in about three hours of off and on listening), which is I guess to be expected using the free basic service. You’re also allowed 6 song skips in each hour, which ain’t bad. And you can cache your station so that you can continue to listen to your music even when you got no bars. And when I hooked my BlackBerry up to the WIndows machine I use for maintenence, it loaded the Slacker app to the PC so that I could enjoy my music there too. That’s just awesomesauce.

For $3.99 a month you can sign up for their Premium service, which gives you unlimited skips, no adverts and a custom station that allows you to choose an unlimited number of songs. At the moment, I need to spend another four bucks a month like I need a kick in the colon, so I’m sticking with the basic service, which is better than good enough for me.

Eventually, I’ll get myself some bluetooth headphones, car kit and home dock (like I said, caveman) and practically live on the Slacker when I’m on the go.

If you have a BlackBerry and dig the music thing, then the Slacker app is an absolute fucking must. It looks good, it sounds good and works great.

AngryBob

Link: http://www.slacker.com/mobile/blackberry

from the basement computer, not the BlackBerry.

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